Friday, May 9, 2008

Ben Stein was awarded a silver medal in Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World a few nights ago for his continued whoring of his new "movie" Expelled. And this one should get him the gold. Stein was recently interviewed for Christianity Today and makes a complete sleeze of himself. Here's his "aw, shucks" opener:

How familiar were you with the subject of Intelligent Design prior to this?

Stein: Not at all. I'm still not that familiar with it. I'm more familiar with it than most people, but nowhere near as familiar with it as a genuine expert in the subject. I don't pretend to be a scientist. I'm the person who moderates the discussion between and among the scientists.

You know, if you're not a professional journalist/reporter, and you're not an expert on the subject matter, you'd better work twice as hard to convince me you've done your research. Oh, wait:

Did you do a lot of reading to prep for the role?

Stein: Some. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler...

Not exactly balancing the ol' scales by reading On the Origin of Species, is he?

And then he follows up with this nice piece of reportorial neutrality:

Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists were telling Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists were telling Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50 million people in order to further the revolution.

And it's the Jewish Anti-Defamation League that is telling Ben Stein to shut up, already:

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

Can't really argue that, can you? But then, the creationist scum for whom Stein is the official pitch man aren't interested in facts, now, are they? They're interested in the same thing in which they've always been interested: power over people's thought and keeping the pews (and collection plates) full.